Book: La transparencia informativa de las Administraciones públicas (Information transparency of public administrations. The right of the people to know and the duty to disseminate public information actively) by Miguel Angel Climent Blanes has just been published by Thomson-Reuters Aranzadi (ISBN: 978-84-9059-397-4). The author is s Doctor in Law and has served as an officer of various public institutions, including: counsel for the Council of Alicante and legal adviser to the Ombudsman of the Valencian Community. The book analyzes the existing legal and judicial situation in the leading democracies of the world and within the United Nations , Council of Europe and European Union, with a special emphasis on sensitive information. The author coins the slogan: “la transparencia es como la sinceridad: se exige la ajena y se limita la propia.” (
Transparency is like sincerity; demanded of others but less of one’s self.)
Commentary: “Thinking and Working Politically in the Transparency and Accountability Field,” by Brendan Halloran, Program Officer for Impact and Learning, Transparency and Accountability Initiative. Main points:
• Challenges in the transparency and accountability (T/A) sector are rooted in political dynamics between states and citizens, and thus must be addressed through politically informed approaches
• The analysis of political factors has advanced over the past decade, but organizations still struggle to move from ‘thinking politically’ to ‘working politically’
• ‘Working politically’ in the T/A sector has concrete implications for both organizational approaches and how we understand change and impact, which must be rooted in nuanced understandings of political context and role of pro-accountability actors
He says political analysis “can unpack concepts such as ‘political will’, which can often be an ‘analytical black box’ that can undermine an organization’s [theory of change] by leaving important causal linkages unspecified or assumed.”
OGP Commentary: An article by Chris Underwood, Making All Voices Count’s Director of Global Action. entitled “Politics, Big Business & Dark Data: Reflections from OGP Dublin. It says in part:
On the agenda were multiple themes but what stood out for me were three areas which together will do much to determine the impact of OGP on real life governance for good or ill. Despite those challenges, however, the glass remains half full and it’s incumbent on all of us to act as well as argue.
Commentary: Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of The Associated Press, calls on fellow journalists to remain vigilant in pressing government and institutions for access to public information during an address to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press on Monday in New York.
Open Data Commentary. A post by John Wunderlich on the Sunlight Foundation blog asks if the Obama administration’s experiment with Data.gov is a success?
He comments:
The Obama vision of using technology to democratize power has decayed into economic boosterism, finding validation primarily through the activity of private industry.
And concludes:
Even if Data.gov can’t live up to its initial billing, its greatest benefits may lie in the space it creates for developers, civil servants and policymakers for incremental reform, investigation and dialogue. While there’s value in slight improvements in finding data online through a huge aggregation service, Data.gov seems most effective at changing how we view and approach administration information policy as a whole. And when Congress starts paying more attention to open data initiatives, we’ll be better off for the head start pioneered by civil servants working on the Data.gov initiative.
Open Data Commentary: Opening Up EU Procurement Data by Friedrich Lindenberg begins, “What is the next European dataset that investigative journalists should look at?”
Contract Transparency: Global Integrity’s Nathaniel Heller writes about the growing number of countries requiring the publication of contracts.
Countries that have already put contracts online or in print must ensure that the practice is maintained, and that new agreements are subject to the same public scrutiny. And in all places, civil society and researchers must take advantage of disclosure and use the contracts for better analysis. But these steps demonstrate clearly that that the old arguments hold little weight, and that more and more governments are seeing the value of opening up their contracts for citizens to read, scrutinize and monitor.
Book: The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development, a new book by Matt Andrews is described in a blog by Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB.
Limits is about why change doesn’t happen, and how it could. It synthesizes the ‘groundswell’ of disquiet about the failure of the governance and institutional reforms that have been promoted for many years now by aid agencies like the World Bank.
Transparency Conference: The 4th Global Conference on Transparency Research will be held in Lugano, Switzerland June 4, 5 and 6, 2015. All the information related to the conference will be posted on http://www.transparency.usi.ch/ The decision was taken to extend the period between conferences to 1.5 years. The objective is to give everyone a bit more time to produce, and therefore present, their research.
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